A Little Experiment
by AlexxandriaKrieger
Summary: He'd been sent to the Little Wonders Orphanage just like a lot of kids. His parents thought he'd be safer there than anywhere else in Rapture, especially with a Civil War brewing. But they were very, very wrong. (OC Little Sister and Little Brother story. R&R please)
1. Procedures

The little boy looked around the poster covered walls of the hallway with curious grey eyes. His parents were poor, unable to take care of all of their children. As he was the youngest and unable to work, he was sent to the Little Wonder's Orphanage. There were more girls than boys, he'd noticed, a lot of the boys disappearing after they went to Papa Suchong's clinic. But a lot of the girls that went there came back okay. He didn't really understand it, and he was a little scared of going to the clinic himself. Mama Tenenbaum told them it was only for some flu shots, but if that was true then why did the boys not come back?

"Will you play with me?" the boy heard, causing him to give a startled glance to the red-haired girl that now stood beside him. She wore a blue dress and no shoes, and her eyes were a pretty ocean color.

"Sure!" he replied with a smile.

"Yay! I'm Cleo! What's your name?" the ginger girl returned his smile excitedly.

"Antony, but my mama just called me Tony."

"We're friends now." Cleo said with a firm and very adult tone, crossing her arms.

"Oh. Okay." Tony simply smiled at her. He was fine with having a friend.

Cleo grabbed his hand excitedly and pulled him off to the girls' hallway. He wasn't supposed to go there, but he figured it was okay if it was to play. Tony didn't understand why the boys weren't supposed to go to the girls' rooms anyways. Cleo pulled him into a bedroom that he assumed was her's. It was violently pink, making her brilliant red hair stand out like a sore thumb. Scattered all about the floor were different toys, teddy bears and a doll of the Big Daddies from the Learning Room. Without thinking about it, Tony immediately picked up the doll, remembering that Daddy was good and Mommy was bad.

"What do you wanna play?" he asked, sitting down on the floor and looking at the doll.

"Let's go shopping!" Cleo declared. "I'm the mama and you're the baby!"

"Why do I gotta be the baby?"

"Cuz I'm the mama."

"Oh. Okay." Tony set the doll down and stood up, following the red-haired girl as she began pretending to push around a cart and walked around her room.

"Do you remember what we need, baby Tony?" Cleo asked in a very good mama tone. Tony replied by making baby gurgles, which made Cleo break character for a moment. "You can talk, silly!"

"Oh. Okay." Tony paused, trying to think of things that you would buy at a store. "Uhh...cake!"

"Do you want me to make a cake when we get done shopping?"

"Yes! I like cake." Tony smiled at her happily, and Cleo smiled back. Their game continued, oblivious to the adult things happening all around them.

"The Little Brother program is a failure, Tenenbaum, just admit it!" Suchong snapped at the female scientist. "These brats are too violent, like feral dogs."

"They produce more ADAM than the girls do, we can't just _end_ the entire program," Tenenbaum retorted. "The boys we have changed so far have been older, and I believe that is why they are so violent. We have a boy here who is as young as the girls. He may be the solution."

"It will be nothing but another waste of time," Suchong spat. "We have lost three of the Little Sisters and two of my nurses to these menaces. What if they get loose before we are able to put them down?"

"He will be docile, I swear to you," Tenenbaum replied, trying to remain calm even though she dearly wanted to smack the Korean doctor right across his face. "If not, we will kill the program and send the remaining boys to Persephone."

Suchong sent some of Fontaine's muscle bound goons to retrieve the little blond boy that Tenenbaum swore was the savior of the Little Brothers program. In his opinion, Tenenbaum was too attached to the little monsters, letting her feminine emotions cloud her scientific judgement. They found the boy in one of the girls' room, much to his annoyance, playing some silly little game with one of the girls that hadn't gone through the implantation procedure just yet. The brats started screaming and crying as the goons grabbed the boy and began to carry him to the surgery room. Hopefully after he was done proving Tenenbaum wrong, he would have the day free to finish working on the Big Daddies. That damned protection bond was still flawed.

Antony struggled against the grown men, but it was utterly useless to even try. They were three times his size, and saw the little boy as nothing more than an inconvenience.

"I d-don't wanna, Papa Suchong!" he cried as the men made him sit on a surgery bed. Suchong sighed with annoyance, ignoring the child's crying as he strapped the mask onto him to introduce the anesthetic to his system. The opiates were so strong, Antony was out in moments.

Suchong strapped the boy's arms and legs to the surgery bed as a precaution, and put his surgical mask on. It was a very quick and simple procedure, but they could only do so many a day as they mental conditioning had to be advanced to a certain point before the children would be calm enough that their bodies wouldn't reject the implantation. The nurse that had entered the surgery room to assist him unbuttoned the boy's shirt and cleaned the incision area with a wet cloth. Suchong took a scalpel and made a simple, clean incision across the boy's stomach, blood immediately welling up. He pulled the skin apart and took the ADAM producing slug from the nurse, carefully placing it against the lining of the young boy's stomach. After that, the ADAM did the rest. Immediately the slug embedded itself against his stomach, and the skin and tissue mended seamlessly, encasing it inside Antony's body. The nurse took a new wet cloth and cleaned the blood off the boy, then buttoned his shirt back up.

"Take him to the isolation chamber," Suchong ordered the woman in a bored tone. He knew this boy would be no different from the others, and wanted him to cause as little damage as possible when he snapped. The nurse nodded and unstrapped the unconscious boy from the surgery table, picking him up and carrying him out of the room. The anesthetic was very strong, and kept even the quick-to-heal Little Ones unconscious for a good thirty minutes.

Suchong leaned down to check the tank of gas that had knocked the boy out, figuring he would need to refill it soon. Queerly, it read as empty. He tilted his head and pulled down his glasses to make sure he was reading it correctly. If it was already empty, then the boy couldn't have gotten the full dosage…

"Nurse?" The doctor stood up quickly, picking up his emergency Placation Plasmid and walking quickly towards the door. He heard a scream, and rushed to the door to find the emergency security system had locked it. Suchong looked through the window of the door to see the little boy scrambling into one of those blasted vents, the nurse that had been carrying him bleeding heavily and missing a chunk from her neck. Her eyes were glazed over in death, terror on her face.

"NURSE!"


	2. Survivals

**A/N: Sorry it took a bit to update, thank you to ANon and KillerWoW for the reviews! :)**

* * *

Antony woke up several hours later. He was alone and cold, unable to see anything in the dark metal vent. His muscles ached and cramped, and stretching out was a struggle in the tight space. He had no idea where he was, so he decided to just keep crawling until he saw some light. He hadn't realized that the hidey-holes were all connected like this; when they watched the videos in the Learning Center, it just said to go in them when you were tired or scared.

Eventually he reached a noisy area that smelled heavily of food. He peeked his head out of the vent to see a market, crowded with the the scarred up people that were in the videos they showed in the Learning Center. They would have two screens up, a video of people like this on one and a video of the big men in diving suits on the other. If you pressed the button on the men in suits, you got potato chips. If you pressed the other, however… Antony whimpered in imagined pain and scrambled back for a moment.

He was hungry, however, and the smell of food was incredibly tempting. Keeping in mind that these people meant pain, he slowly crawled forward and dropped out of the vent, disappearing into the legs of those walking past. He grabbed the skirt of one woman without her noticing, and as she stopped to browse a selection of gross-smelling cheese, Antony reached in and grabbed one of the loafs of bread, quickly running back into the crowd.

"Ma'am, you're going to have to pay for that bread your child just took." the man behind the counter said loudly. The woman looked at him with confusion.

"Child? I don't have any children." she objected, looking mildly offended.

"Oh, damn street kids!" the man swore, pressing a button that sounded an alarm. The polite female voice called out, _Thievery is a capital punishment in Rapture! Security bots will now be released. Thank you for your patronage._

The rest of the shoppers simply parted to the sides, revealing the small blond boy to the bots that started dropping from the ceiling. Panicking, Antony ran back to the vent, holding the bread tightly. He tossed the loaf up into the opening, jumping up and trying to pull himself into it as quickly as he could. A sharp sting went through his arm, followed by a burning sensation. The bullets had gone straight through his flesh and he immediately healed. Something snapped at the assault, his softly glowing red eyes suddenly flaring. His veins glowed gold through his sickly greenish skin as ADAM charged his body. It almost seemed to make him grow a little taller and he kicked off and tore the propellers off the security bots with his bare hands. The machines dropped to the ground and began beeping, preparing to self-destruct. Antony looked up at the crowd, who had backed away from him. They looked freaked out, and after a very tense moment, Antony pulled himself back into the vent and crawled back as far as he could, bread in tow.

He ate his quick breakfast, curled up again, and laid down on the cold metal. What was he going to do? If he went back to the orphanage, he'd get punished. He didn't wanna find out what happened to those other boys who'd been sent to Papa Suchong's clinic. He didn't know where his parents lived; not that they would want him back anyways, they'd given him up because they _didn't_ want him. Adoption wasn't exactly popular, so it wasn't likely anyone else would take him in. He figured he'd just have to keep living in these vents for the rest of his life. He didn't wanna be a thief; he wanted to be a good boy who didn't hurt anybody. He didn't want to be a _Parasite_, like they showed in that amusement park. He didn't see any other choice, though.

So, he created a pattern. He'd sleep in the back of the vents, go to the Farmer's Market to steal some food, go back to the vents, and sometimes play with one of the girls that ran into him in the vents. Sometimes people would call those security bots on him again, but when he got shot by them he got angry and soon they weren't shooting at him anymore. The days passed by with little regard to the young boy they effected so drastically.

The ADAM made Antony's body mature faster than it should have. When only a year had passed, he already looked like a thirteen year old. The state of Rapture also affected him, making his mind both mature and decay. He started to understand what was going on in the city; there was a man named Fontaine, who had funded the orphanage, then there was a man named Atlas who started a Civil War. The sounds of the city turned into the sounds of a battlefield, and the boy who lived in Rapture's walls didn't even notice the difference.

The market he normally stole his food from was no longer filled with vendors and buyers. Instead it's streets were littered with corpses. He knew he was supposed to do something with those corpses, but for the life of him he couldn't remember. So instead, Antony just looted them. Most of them had pistols and ammo, which were useless to him, but if he scavenged enough he could find money to buy pep bars and sodas out of the vending machines. They were never empty, which part of him found confusing, but at least he was sure he wouldn't go hungry.

Pretty soon two years had passed since he'd ran away from the orphanage. Antony had been living in Arcadia this whole time, and in spite of only being nine years old he looked nearly fully grown. The ADAM that his body created was almost never regurgitated, like with his female counterparts, and was instead being absorbed again and increasing his growth. He saw a lot of the Big Daddies and Little Sister pairs all around, but he kept distant. Even though he'd been conditioned to see the monstrous men as protectors, seeing how easily they tore apart the bands of five or even ten Splicers that came together to take them down scared Antony away.

He'd grown too large to get into the vents anymore, so he'd taken to sleeping in a cellar that could only be reached through a crawlspace door behind a long-since looted fruit stand. It wasn't the nicest set up, but it was better than getting killed for sleeping out in the open. He didn't know what morning or night was anymore, just sleeping when tired, so when he woke up he figured it was as good a time for breakfast as any.

Antony pushed himself up into a sitting position, pulling the small door open. His grubby hands pulled his tired body out of the cellar, and he stood to his full height. His clothes, looted from a dead man who no longer needed them, were shabby and torn and stained by blood and ADAM. He felt his belly grumble with hunger, a feeling he'd never been foreign to, and made his way towards the vending machines. The blue one he bought food from made it's stupid sounds, "_Welcome to the Circus of Values!_" that always made him flinch. He didn't even hear himself often enough to be comfortable with human voices anymore.

Somewhere nearby, as he was picking his pep bar out of the little slot, a Big Daddy roared with anger. He could hear the Splicers taunting and shooting, and the eerie voice of a Little Sister crying out, "_Nobody hurts my Daddy!_" Curiosity got the better of him, and Antony followed the sounds. Their source was in the grotto, a stupid Rosie running around in circle and eating bullets while his Little Sister clung to his shoulder. He knew that the Splicers were going to hurt the Sister if they got to her, and that Rosie wasn't slowing them down even when it riveted on of them right between the eyes.

Anger he knew all too well began to boil up inside him, teasing him, whispering to him to do something. To protect. He didn't carry weapons, though; the nearest corpse had a loose grip on two meat hooks, so he grabbed those instead. He jumped down, hooks raised, and landed on the shoulders of a Splicer with a machine gun. The hooks found a home in the man's eyes, and his face was practically torn apart, bathing the murderous boy in blood.

Hesitation from his fellows led to two more deaths caused by the Rosie, who was quickly put down with a shotgun blast. The Splicers turned their attention to Antony, but he was far too fast for their unprepared attempts. Within minutes, they were brutally dealt with, and Antony's fair hair had dyed red with their essence.

The Little Sister sobbed behind him, crying for her Daddy to get up. Her cries were only going to attract attention from more people trying to hurt her, so Antony made a snap decision and reached down to cover her mouth.

The girl didn't scream or panic like she would if a Splicer had grabbed her; she instead silenced, staring at the boy with confusion. He glowed like one of the other girls, but was tall and heroic like Daddy.

"Are you going to take me to Daddy?" she asked innocently, sure that he was a nice boy.

"Uhm...hidey-hole." Antony responded awkwardly, unaware of how she saw him. "And wait there for your dad."

"Okay mister!" The Sister smiled, and it would've been cute if she wasn't so off-putting. Antony watched her run up the stairs and jump into the vent, not moving until he was sure that she was safe.

He looked around the carnage, seeing the world as it truly was. The boy, mind broken, decided his urge to do something with those bodies, those Angels, had to be to create them. Maybe he was supposed to be one of those suited beasts. He looked over at the Rosie, kicking it slightly to make sure the monster was dead. The suit was a bit big, but he could fix that.

He thought of Cleo. The little girl he'd played with right before his memory turned into patchwork. She was probably out there, wasn't she? She'd be a Little Sister too. She needed to be protected. And these stupid Big Daddies weren't cutting it. Little Sisters needed a Big Brother for when Daddy wasn't home.


	3. Saviors

How long had it been? He didn't keep track of the years anymore. He remembered that he'd been seven when he'd been changed, and now he was much older. He was taller and he was lanky, with a strength that a boy of his stature shouldn't possess. His eyes used to be blue, but now they glowed red. His skin used to be pale and freckled, but now it was a sickly greenish gray and covered in dirt and blood. His blond hair had grown untamed, chin-length and greasy and the heavy helmet he wore made it stick to his sweaty face. Antony was no longer a cute baby-faced little boy; whatever it was that the slug did to his young body, it had turned him into a trim, lean killer that vomited ADAM regularly.

Holding onto his main weapon, a device of hooks and hinges, Antony used it to hang from the ceiling and watch a red-headed Little Sister and her Big Daddy roam the hallways. Cleo stuck out in his memory, something he held on to while the rest of it decayed. He made sure she was safe, that no matter how many Splicers tried to steal the ADAM she carried they all died painfully. He was completely obsessed with her, but what else was he going to do?

Then there was an explosion. Antony's eyes widened and he swung closer to Cleo and the angered Big Daddy, looking for the person that had shot the grenade. A tall man with tidy brown hair and a cable-knit sweater shot another grenade at the Bouncer, who roared and charged at him. Antony kept close, preparing to attack this...Splicer? He didn't look anything like a Splicer, though he was obviously using Plasmids. Maybe he'd only used the internal Plasmids, the ones that gave powers and abilities. Regardless, he was going to have to die. He was threatening Cleo, and it was obvious that those explosives were going to take down the Bouncer with little effort.

With a final roar, the Bouncer fell back and it's lights dimmed as it's life faded. Cleo let out a cry of anguish and ran to the suited monster, crying out for Mister Bubbles to get back up. The man in the sweater lowered his weapon and began walking towards the red-headed girl, reaching out to grab her in an almost gentle manner. But Antony wasn't going to have any of that. He let out an ear-splitting shriek and jumped in between his Sister and his Prey.

Jack took a step back as a tall and slender creature he'd never seen before dropped from the ceiling. It had hooks like a Spider Splicer, but it wore a patched-together suit like a Big Daddy, helmet included. The Little Sister he'd been about to save ran up to this strange man, hiding behind his legs. He was so startled, he didn't even think to react as the hook was suddenly swung towards him and carved into his neck, tearing through his esophagus and ripping it wide open. Blood spilled down his ivory shirt, pooled inside his throat and lungs, and all he could do was choke and stumble backwards, falling to the ground in a fetal position.

_God fucking dammit, not again_, he thought as his consciousness fled, hopefully to the nearest Vita-Chamber.

Cleo saw a world very different than reality. It was bright and beautiful, filled with noble knights and beautiful Angels. It only changed when she became frightened, but Mister Bubbles always made it better. Now he wasn't getting up, though, and she was panicked. Then the strange, golden figure dropped down and fixed it. The imprinting process was designed so that once a Little Sister smelled the Big Daddy pheromones, they immediately ran to the source for protection. This knight didn't look like Mister B at all though; he was a lot thinner and his armor was kind of patchy and covered in rose petals. Once the mean man disappeared and an Angel took his place, Cleo forgot all about being scared and jumped up to try and climb on the back of the new Mister B like she did all the others. He took a startled step back, and after a moment, he took off his helmet.

The way she perceived the world changed how she saw Antony's quickly-matured body. At first he looked like a knight, just like all the Big Daddies did. But when he took off his helmet, something that Mister B never did, her mind had to rationalize it. He wasn't a knight, she quickly decided, so he had to be a prince! His grimy and bloody appearance turned into a regal and handsome one, his patchy suit now looking more like royal armor.

"Are you a prince?" she asked him, tugging on his baggy pants insistently.

"Uhm...yeah, sure." Antony replied, leaning down slowly. "And you're a princess."

"I am?"

"Yeah! And we're on an adventure to save Rapture by giving Angels your kisses."

"Yay! I've always wanted to go on an adventure!"

Antony smiled at Cleo, who bounced around excitedly. She'd forgotten all about her previously terrified state and her now-dead Protector. It was kind of sad, but he knew it was part of the mental conditioning that he'd never been fully put through. As was her immediate attraction to him. It was odd to see how differently the same implantation procedure had effected the two of them. Cleo was at least eight years old, but she looked like she was five or so years older than that. Antony had the physical development of someone twice his age, and mentally he'd developed fairly fast as well. However, Cleo's mental conditioning was designed to slow, if not stop, her mental and emotional aging entirely.

He figured if she wanted to see him as a prince she could do so. He was done trusting those useless suits to protect the most important person in his world. If you want something done right, you do it yourself. He pulled his helmet back on and offered her his hand to hold. Cleo grabbed it excitedly, immediately beginning to chatter about random things. Antony just nodded along and led her through the decrepit, half-flooded hallway. The corpse of that sweatered man had decayed disturbingly fast, but the boy shrugged it off. ADAM did strange things to the human body, why should he care? There were other "angels" for Cleo to extract ADAM from.

Jack woke up with a sharp inhalation and ragged breathing, leaning against the back of the Vita-Chamber. _What the hell was that?_ he thought to himself, checking that all his gear had rematerialized with his body. His sweater was stained with his blood all down the front, a brutal reminder of what the strange creature had done to him without even a blink.

"_You alright, boyo?_" an Irish-accented voice chimed up from his short-wave.

"Yeah. Went to get this Little Sister and bit it." Jack replied, slowly stepping out of the Vita-Chamber.

"_Them Big Daddies can be a piece o' work, yeah?_" Atlas responded with what sounded like a chuckle.

"That's the thing, it wasn't a Big Daddy. I mean, he was wearing parts like a Big Daddy's, but he was a lot smaller and he used hooks like one of those Spider Splicers."

"_Tha' don't sound like nothing I recognize. Might be another one o' Tenenbaum's Frankensteins, yeah?_"

"I'll ask her."

Jack cut off another one of Atlas' smart-ass remarks, not even wanting to hear about all the absolutely awful things that Tenenbaum had done. He got it, no one who talked to him liked one another, he didn't need re-confirmation every time he spoke with them.

"Tenenbaum?" he spoke into the microphone of the short-wave, hoping she was at her own radio.

"_Yes? What do you want?_" the scientist responded after a minute.

"I just wanted to ask if there were any other Big Daddy types? Any that were slimmer, used hooks?"

"_Slimmer yes. The Lancer. But this type was only a concept, and he used no hooks._"

"Well then how did I just get killed by a bean-pole Big Daddy with a Rosie helmet and Spider Splicer hooks?"

"_I have no ideas. See if you can take pictures with the research camera and send them to me in the Pneumo?_"

"If I can find it again, will do."


	4. UPDATE!

Hey, just letting you know that I've begun rewriting this story. The new first chapter has been uploaded as a different story, and I'm going to leave this one up.

The new version is under the name "Big Brother Is Watching," and tbh I'm pretty excited about it because it's already twice as long and more fleshed out! :)


End file.
